by AngelaWhite

Created on: February 23, 2011   Last Updated: March 14, 2011

The year my youngest son graduated from first grade, an awful blight swept over the farms in our region. Potatoes, corn, and carrots were hard hit but the tomatoes suffered the worst. Only three on every plant were okay and there was little we could do beyond watching it rot on the vine. Under the soil was no different and each evening during harvest, moldy ears of corn, rotten tomatoes, and deformed carrots could be seen sailing through the air, from the garden to the rubbage pile we turned regularly for fertilizer. All around us, our neighbors were doing the same and the attempts to combat this newest plague ranged from doing nothing to burning every field to stop the spread.

Nothing worked and we continued to harvest and throw, harvest and throw. My son, who often worked beside us, had a yeller dog that went everywhere he did. During the season, it wasn't uncommon to see the golden retriever helping us maintain things by chasing rabbits and crows away. The dog's name was Pete. This was short for repeat, which the friendly animal liked to do. From helping pull the rotten fruit and whining in tones that resembled speech, to walking on his hind legs when company came over, Pete wanted to do what we were doing. Or what other animals were doing. Especially the rabbits. Pete loved to chase them but he didn't run after them the way a normal dog does. He hopped after them. You'd see a terrified rabbit hop about five foot and the a huge yellow dog hop into the spot where the rabbit had just been. Pete's leaps were huge and he got height on them. As the corn grew up, we'd be harvesting mushing and molding beans and watching Pete's head bob up between the rows every ten feet or so as he hopped after the rabbits. It was hilarious. It also did a lot of damage to the plants but at that point, the war had been lost to the blight and the laughter it brought us was right in the middle of some very trying times as our sale products were rotting before our eyes., and we let him go.

The end of the season saw some hope. The very last batch of tomatoes had come in and only half of the vegetables were being effected by the blight. It was much too late and too small a batch to be able to do more than pad our cellar but it made us feel better for the next growing season, like maybe the disease was burning itself out. 

We chose to leave the surviving tomatoes until the last moment, their size only half of normal, and went to bed the night before the last picking without realizing we’d forgotten something. 

Our mistake was not chaining up Pete. He'd spent so much time actually pulling rotten fruits and vegetables in his attempts to act like us, that he wiped out the entire surviving batch overnight, thinking, I assume, that he was helping. Usually he was in the barn.

The urge to be upset was there but considering all we'd been through, the only bright spots had been watching the ways he’d shake his head and whimper when a particularly rotten one would squish and splatter his pristine coat, or the way you'd only see ears and head for a brief second above the corn as he hopped after those rabbits, and it just didn't match up to the laughter. He was our clown and we loved him for it. Thanks Pete. We needed that.

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